6 Movie Heroes Saved by Gaping Plot Holes

#3. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade -- Selective Bullet-Bouncing in a Tank

What the Movie Tells Us:

If you shoot a bullet inside a tank, it's gonna bounce on the walls and kill someone. Hopefully a Nazi.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is like 90 percent chase scenes, and we love it for that. Perhaps the most memorable is horseback Indy rescuing his father (Sean Connery) and their mutual friend Marcus Brody, who are being held hostage inside a German tank. Here's a sped up version of the entire 10-minute sequence, in case you ever wondered what World War II would be like if everyone talked like a chipmunk:

At one point, a Nazi is about to shoot Daddy Jones when Marcus hits him in the head, causing the Nazi to fire the gun at the ceiling -- the bullet bounces around inside the tank and doesn't stop until it lodges itself in the driver's head. Which makes sense: Tanks are bulletproof, so you'd expect a projectile shot inside of one to bounce off the walls rather than go through them or something.

Tank walls = bulletproof.

This guy's hat = not bulletproof.

Thanks to Marcus' help, the Joneses survive and Indy manages to get the two men out of the tank before it falls off a cliff.

The Convenient Lapse in Logic:

Wait a minute, didn't we see a freaking cannon blow up inside the tank less than five minutes earlier? When Indy approaches the tank, he takes out one of the cannons by A) jamming a rock into the barrel:

Also known as the Bugs Bunny Gambit.

B) moving away from the tank so the gunner can get a good shot at him:

And C) watching the resulting explosion. Hey, if it works for Bugs Bunny, it should work in real life, right? Except that we see the projectile blowing backward into the tank, killing the gunner and sending shrapnel bouncing all through the tank, and then ...

Sparklers!

... nothing. They stop. So, let's get this straight: A single bullet bounces around the tank until it finds a human head to lodge itself in, but dozens of pieces of explosive shrapnel just fall harmlessly to the floor? At the same time? Did the walls stop being bulletproof for a second there? Had the projectiles reacted the same way both times, everyone inside the tank would have been killed in the ensuing pandemonium.

"If you guys are all right, signal by thumping against the wall and slowly sliding down it!"

By blowing up the cannon, Indy was taking a huge risk that could have easily killed the people he was trying to rescue, which begs the question: Why didn't he just jump on the tank once he was close enough to jam the cannon anyway?

#2. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl -- The Magic Pirates Forget They Are Magic

What the Movie Tells Us:

The curse of the Black Pearl makes pirates look like zombies, but also gives them supernatural abilities.

In the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the entire crew of a ship called the Black Pearl is cursed after they steal a chest of Aztec gold, turning them into pirate zombies for all eternity. The only way to break the curse is to return the treasure they stole -- unfortunately, one of the coins went missing years ago and is currently in the possession of the daughter of the governor of Port Royal, Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightly). The pirates can sense the coin, so they attack Port Royal and kidnap Elizabeth.

That's a lot more explosions than we remember from the Disney ride.

The upside to the curse is that as long as they're zombies, the pirates are also immortal, a fact that Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) exploits to his benefit twice in the movie: first when he steals a coin to intentionally curse himself and avoid getting killed, and then when he breaks the curse to turn his rival mortal and shoot him in the head.

So to recap, that's two magical powers the curse gives you: immortality and the ability to sense magic coins across great distances.

The Convenient Lapse in Logic:

Of course, the pirates only seem to remember that they have these powers when it's convenient to the writers. When Elizabeth is kidnapped and brought aboard the Black Pearl, the only reason they don't kill her right away is that she has the missing coin and threatens to throw it in the water. The pirates practically shit themselves when they see her do that, and she's able to negotiate a permanent cease fire on Port Royal.

"The 50 of us are no match for this frail lady in pajamas!"

Everyone acts like Elizabeth has the pirates by the balls ... which makes no sense, given what we know about them. Say she drops the coin in the water: Big deal, they're immortal. What's stopping them from going down to the ocean floor and picking it right up? Say the floor is extra murky and the coin gets buried; again, not a problem, because they can magically sense where it is. They sensed the coin all the way across the ocean and into Elizabeth's house, right down to the closet where she was hiding.

"Badass. Now let's get back to looting and murdering that entire city."

Also, it's not like they were in the middle of the ocean, where the coin might sink really deep, the currents are stronger and there's no light: They were right there in the Port Royal harbor, which, as demonstrated by Sparrow's introductory scene, isn't deep enough that the mast of his sinking boat didn't stick up far enough for him to disembark.

#1. District 9 -- Wikus Sprays Several Years' Worth of Fuel on His Face

What the Movie Tells Us:

It takes the stranded aliens 20 years to get enough fuel to fly back to their planet, and every single drop counts.

District 9 takes place in an alternate reality where 1982 isn't remembered as the year Thriller came out, but as the year when an alien spaceship arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa, stranding its occupants on our planet. The South African government, it turns out, isn't a fan of racial diversity, and keeps the aliens (known as "Prawns") separated from the rest of the population in a slum called District 9.

And South Africa has such a track record of equality and integration.

Meanwhile, the spaceship is still hovering over Johannesburg, lacking the power to make the trip back to its home galaxy. Cut to 2010: A Prawn named Christopher Johnson has spent the past 20 years painstakingly collecting fuel from pieces of alien scrap, which he keeps in a small canister. Unfortunately, an assclown human bureaucrat named Wikus Van De Merwe finds the canister and accidentally sprays some of the fuel on his face, which begins mutating him into a Prawn.

"Let me hold this unknown can perilously close to my face, just to see what happens."

Both the canister and Wikus are taken in by the evil company he works for -- eventually Wikus escapes and gives the canister to Christopher, who uses it to power the spaceship and fly off into space, telling Wikus he'll be back in three years with help for the Prawns (and a cure for him).

The Convenient Lapse in Logic:

What everyone seems to forget is that there's no way Christopher will make it back to his planet now, because earlier in the movie, Wikus sprayed several light-years of space travel on his face like a dumbass.

A lightspeed bukake. Heh heh. A hyperfacial.

Before that, we saw Christopher and his friend collecting the last drop of fuel before announcing "the plan is ready." First they pour a liquid from the piece of scrap they found:

Then they distill that liquid into a single drop of fuel:

And finally they put that into the canister. As soon as the drop falls into the canister, the light on it turns from orange to blue, as if signaling that it's finally full.

This is the most unnecessarily drawn-out drop in cinematic history.

It took them 20 years of repeating that process to fill the canister: If they could afford to leave without that drop, they would have powered the spaceship a long time ago, right? They knew that at any moment the humans could find their hidden technology, take it away and ruin everything (especially if their fuel also happens to mutate people into superpowered hybrids).

And since the Prawn planet was so far away from our galaxy that we didn't even know about it, that means Christopher will most likely run out of fuel somewhere in the middle of space, with no way to keep going or return.

"I'm not stopping for gas here, it's five cents cheaper over by Alpha Centauri."

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